By 'eck, Big Eck has just said Birmingham will not be held to ransom. By that, Alex McLeish means that just because his club's pockets are now stuffed with Hong Kong money he will not be paying silly prices for ordinary players come the transfer window, and, of course, he is talking nonsense.

All football money is silly money anyway, and come the transfer window Birmingham will most likely be over a barrel. "We will not pay over the odds for players because that is the road to ruin," McLeish said. "If we are competing with someone else we may have to pay a little bit more to acquire the player we want, but not if the selling club decides to double the price."

That should be interesting then, should Birmingham be within a point or two of the relegation positions by Christmas. McLeish, not exactly accustomed to throwing money around, is going to have to both persuade players to take a chance on Birmingham, while insisting to selling clubs and agents that he is not prepared to go above a certain price. Even though he has £40m to spend in January and thank you, Mr Carson Yeung, for telling the whole world about that. Thank you also, Mr President, for the hostage to fortune that is: "We want to spend money in January to make sure we stay in the Premier League this season, maybe to finish ninth or 10th and not be a yo-yo club any more." No pressure there then. It would not be surprising to discover turkeys feeling less troubled about Christmas than the Birmingham manager.

The reason being that Birmingham are always going to find it difficult to sign good players, regardless of the identity of their new owners or the amounts of money they can put on the table. Wigan find it difficult to sign good players, and they have been around for five years, sometimes even managing mid-table finishes. That's why they source them from Colombia and Honduras (though let's not forget Wilson Palacios started out at St Andrew's). Hull, Burnley, Wolves, Stoke, even Sunderland find it hard to nail their targets when bigger clubs are interested, and if a good player is available then bigger clubs will almost always be interested.

Large amounts of money can make things slightly easier, though bundles of cash bring problems of their own, as McLeish has just hinted. When you are in the market for non-marquee signings, the type of player that almost by definition would not interest clubs in the top half of the table, you want to be paying prices that reflect that. Some clubs, Sheffield Wednesday spring to mind, have set off on the road to ruin by spending money they did not really have in a desperate effort to preserve Premier League status. McLeish appears to be just as worried that it is possible to do the same thing with millions in the bank. He should be. Birmingham will be held to ransom and McLeish, as he probably knows already, is going to be judged on the quality of his January signings.

Massive injections of money are what earned the Premier League the world's attention in the first place, and increasingly it seems massive amounts of money are required just to take part. Should Birmingham succeed in their bid to spend their way to mid-table security, it seems likely a less financially favoured club will make way, so that once the process has been repeated a few more times the Premier League will consist of 20 rich men and their playthings. Owners, in other words, are the new supporters. The old supporters will just be optional extras.

This scenario has lately been worrying the owner of an honorary doctorate in business administration from Manchester Metropolitan University. His name is Sir Alex Ferguson, and he is a big pal of Big Eck. "I think there is an awful lot of expenditure and you say to yourself where is it going to end?" Ferguson asks. "That is exactly what was happening in the business world two years ago. The warning signs are there in football, just the same, but nobody seems to be bothering about it. You wonder where it's going to go, and what might happen if a major club collapsed. People are treating football as an item for themselves, owning clubs with untold wealth. The clubs don't complain, but is it good for the game?"

That's not even half the story. A club such as Manchester United are in foreign hands through a bold takeover financed by their own wealth. As with developments at Portsmouth, Leeds, QPR and Notts County this season, the quaint anachronism "good for the game" does not really apply. As impenetrable as the world of finance can be, you don't need a doctorate in business administration to know the answer to Ferguson's question.